by Wendy Lesser
Still, there were a small number of employees who never left, and these—most notably David Wisdom and Henry Wilcots—were the ones who took on the responsibility for finishing the massive Dhaka project. Gary Moye, who was part of that group, recalled the makeup of the surviving practice. “David Wisdom & Associates had seven partners—David Wisdom, Henry Wilcots, Gary Moye, Al Comly Jr., John Haaf, Gus Langford, and Reyhan Tansal Larimer,” said Moye. “We probably all assisted at one time or another on Dhaka. I think it’s important to note that the yeoman’s effort goes to David Wisdom and Henry Wilcots. Not enough can be said about that type of dedication and effort, particularly Henry’s.”
It took them nine years, from 1974 to 1983, to complete the Bangladesh Parliament, known as Sher-e-Bangla Nagar by the people for whom it was made. That meant the entire project, counting Lou’s part and theirs, took twenty years from start to finish. As with the Yale Center, there were numerous small decisions to be made after Kahn’s death, infinite complexities caused by new and unexpected local conditions, numberless times when the partners had to ask themselves, and each other, what Lou would have done. He had lived to see the walls rising five feet at a time to nearly their full height, and on his last trip he had even managed to see the eight-sided roof of the Assembly Hall set in its place. But after his death, the intense and all-consuming “determination to finish the capital” that he had mentioned in his dream-report needed to be transmitted to other minds and other hands if it was ever to be carried through. This, miraculously, took place, and perhaps no building of Kahn’s is as singularly his as this project he never lived to finish.
Even as they were struggling with the immense Dhaka job, David Wisdom & Associates were also involved in another assignment, which they shared with Kahn’s friend Aldo Giurgola and his firm, Mitchell/Giurgola. This was the construction, from scratch, of the FDR Four Freedoms Park. At the time of his death Lou had left a set of schematic designs for the project, and the site itself, at the southernmost tip of Roosevelt Island, had been put aside for this particular use, so at least two key elements were safely in place. Kahn had also begun to select the materials, including the granite that would form the walls of the “Room.” He had even specified in advance that the facing sides of the granite blocks, set approximately one inch apart, should be highly polished, whereas the other four sides of each cube should retain their natural finish. But this still left many design elements to be decided upon—for example, the choice of the trees to be planted in the “Garden,” their exact arrangement in the converging allées, the precise ordering of the granite pieces (which varied somewhat in color), the texture of the crushed granite used in the pathways, the nature of the formwork for the outer concrete walls, the relationship of the ha-ha to the rest of the enclosed space, and all sorts of other things, large and small.
Added to these complications were squabbles among the various governmental and private bodies involved in the project, repeated concerns related to funding and sponsors, and changes in environmental and construction laws (including the newly passed Americans with Disabilities Act’s requirement that the gravel pathways be bonded together with resin so as to be traversable by wheelchairs—not an unreasonable regulation, given FDR’s own wheelchair-bound state). Decades passed as these issues were addressed and resolved. Dave Wisdom, who died in 1996, never lived to see the project’s completion. Neither did John Haaf, the partner from the firm who took lead responsibility on it. After the dissolution of David Wisdom & Associates, the Roosevelt Island commission passed into the hands of Mitchell/Giurgola and their various subcontractors, who let the project lapse due to a lack of financing. Only after former UN ambassador William vanden Heuvel began a new round of concerted fund-raising—which led to the establishment of Four Freedoms Park LLC, under the directorship of Gina Pollara—was the monument finally finished in 2012, almost forty years after Lou had started it.
Harriet Pattison, after attending one meeting in 1993, was essentially excluded from the design process; the landscape architecture was handled instead by Lois Sherr Dubin, who had been hired as an outside consultant by Mitchell/Giurgola in 1974. Certain elements of Pattison’s original plan were jettisoned in the course of construction—the European hornbeams she had selected for the allées, for instance, were discarded in favor of linden trees—and at the time of the monument’s opening in 2012, Harriet professed herself unhappy with the Garden. But when she saw the Room itself, she felt “amazement. Really astonishment. Going to the Room was wonderful.” The approach worked too, she acknowledged: “the arrival and the steps and then suddenly the perspective and walking through trees down to this wonderful thing.” And when she finally got to the Room and was left alone there for a while, she was able to feel a long-deferred satisfaction on Lou’s behalf as well as her own. “People had disappeared, and I was right there, alone,” she said, and in that moment “I thought about him. There was nobody there then. And I felt wonderful. He did it.”
In describing that moment of simultaneous solitude and communion, Harriet Pattison captured something essential about the way Four Freedoms Park affects its visitors. Even if you know nothing about Lou or his history, or for that matter nothing about Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his history, you still approach the semi-enclosed, semi-concealed, glimpsed-from-a-distance Room with the kind of excited anticipation Pattison mentioned. In the course of your journey, you will have been faced with all sorts of choices: not only whether to travel to Roosevelt Island via air tram, subway, or car, but also how to get from the park entrance (which is defined by the rather lovely ruin of a Renwick-designed smallpox hospital) to the monument itself. Should you follow one of the lower walkways that will keep you close to the lapping water of the East River, or should you ascend the pyramid-like staircase that will lead you up to the grassy park? If the former, should you take the right-hand walk, with its novel, expansive views of Manhattan, or the left, which looks toward Queens and Brooklyn? And if you go via the park, should you stick with one of the two converging pathways that lead forward under the arching trees, or should you wander down the middle of the grassy trapezoidal expanse? Whichever of these options you choose—whichever of your multiple “freedoms” you exercise—you will experience the same sense of grounded satisfaction when you finally arrive at the walled-but-open structure that is your destination.
Once you are inside the Room, those one-inch slivers of space between the twelve-foot-high blocks of granite can function as either shadow joints (if you view them from an angle) or light joints (if you stand directly opposite them), and either way, they possess a kind of magical ability to reveal and conceal at once. They tease you with the offer of a view, but when you approach and put your eye to the crack, you will see only the same severely restricted strip of Manhattan or Queens that you saw from a few feet away; the very thickness of the walls defeats your effort to widen your perspective. The granite blocks themselves are both protective and imprisoning, conjuring up the thick walls of an ancient castle, with its similarly narrow slivers designed for arrow launching. Yet this sense of containment is countered not only by the wide blue sky above you, but also by the completely open end of the Room, where you can look south toward New York Harbor as well as east and west at the surrounding boroughs. Something about the arrangement is reminiscent of the Salk Institute plaza, though the scale is entirely different. There is no space here for a Salk-like central fountain, but then, there is no need of it: the river itself splashes at the edges of the monument, offering its own quiet accompaniment to your thoughts.
A peaceful place, this memorial to a dead president and his humane, politically advanced exhortations is moving but never sentimental. The austerity of the granite is itself soothing, as if to signal that human emotion is important, indeed essential, but can nonetheless be transcended at times. As you sit contemplatively on one of the granite benches, the stone feels cool to the touch, and the sun, on a bright spring or fall day, is warm on your back. You are in th
e midst of a great city here, and yet you are also removed: not just from the rushing anxieties of everyday life, but also from the pressing sense of life’s evanescence that historical monuments often evoke. The shadow your body casts on the pale granite is overlaid at times by those of the other bodies passing to and fro. But even in the presence of other visitors, your own sense of private communion with the place, if you sit still enough, will always return.
* * *
These three posthumously completed structures are the rarities. The vast majority of the projects Kahn left unfinished at his death were never built. Sometimes—as with the museum for the Menil Collection in Houston, which ultimately went to Renzo Piano—another architect stepped in and did his own successful version of the building. Sometimes, as with the Hurva Synagogue in Jerusalem, a whole series of replacement architects was brought in over the decades, and still no modern structure was ever built. (A reconstruction of the nineteenth-century Hurva, representing no one’s idea of a grand architectural solution, finally opened in 2010.) Nobody ever took Kahn’s place on the Palazzo dei Congressi in Venice, or the Abbasad commercial development in Tehran, or several of the smaller commissions he had in hand in America and abroad. They simply went undone.
His death may have prevented these projects from being completed, but it is not certain they would have been finished even had he lived longer. Kahn’s career, after all, was littered with unbuilt designs. He was, as he said, a terrible businessman: his projects always came in late, and he had little concern for the bottom line, an attitude which would not have endeared him to many clients. Nonetheless, there could be hidden advantages to his financial inefficiency. A person more obsessed with exact accounting might have realized he was going bankrupt and been forced to close up shop. Lou’s useful disregard for such matters allowed him to continue with his work in the way he chose to do it, decade after decade. And this method made a lot of sense to some of his employees, despite its effect on their paychecks. Mundane work delivered on schedule could not compare, in their view, with the masterpieces Lou was slowly and inefficiently producing. “Denise Scott Brown once said to me that Lou Kahn didn’t have a good track record because he didn’t get his work done on time and he ran over the budget,” Marshall Meyers once remarked. “My reply to that would be, ‘Well, which track have we chosen to run on?’”
And then there was his notorious allegiance to the truth, or at any rate to his idea of truth in architecture. This too made him difficult for some clients to work with. But what determined the difference between the built projects and the unbuilt ones was not just Lou’s stubbornness. After all, there were cases when his strenuous resistance to a client’s demands—for instance at Exeter, where he refused to chop off the library’s top floor—triumphed, and resulted in a better building. So there was no consistent single problem. A different reason, or at least a different combination of factors, seemed to lie behind each incompletion.
Sometimes, of course, the client simply ran out of money. That probably explains why the Meeting House at the Salk Institute, on which Kahn labored for years, was never built: it was a beautiful luxury, and though Lou considered it in many ways the heart of the project, for Salk the laboratories and studies were far more central to the plan. The proposed residential Village, which also had to be set aside for lack of funds, was another matter. It had never been as important to Kahn—nor, perhaps, to Salk—and the architectural designs for it, which were not particularly noteworthy, had barely taken shape before that part of the project was discontinued.
With the Dominican Motherhouse project, on which Louis Kahn and his office worked intensively for three years, money was only part of the problem. The commission began in 1965, when a group of Dominican nuns sought Kahn out and asked him to build a new convent for them in Media, Pennsylvania. His enthusiasm for the project may have stemmed in part from the inspiration he had received from Le Corbusier’s monastery at La Tourette. He had, besides, a fondness for the idea of the contemplative life, with its daily divisions into private and communal acts of worship, and he was eager to design a space that fostered and contained that duality. He also got along very well with the prioress, Mother Emmanuel, who was about his own age, as were most of the other nuns on the building committee.
Kahn first met with the committee in April of 1966, and even though the sisters had already decided among themselves on a budget ceiling of $1.5 million for the whole project, money was not discussed at that meeting. Nor did the subject come up in August, when Lou and his designated project architect, David Polk, met again with the nuns to discuss further details of the program. But in October of 1966, when Kahn and Polk presented drawings and a cardboard model to the Dominican sisters, even these relatively inexperienced clients realized that the extensive buildings and gardens, covering about 150,000 square feet, could not be done for the price they had in mind. And when they finally received the cost estimate in November, their fears were confirmed: the estimate priced the project at $3.5 million. The Mother Superior politely wrote to Kahn a few weeks later saying they couldn’t afford the plan he had designed; at the end of December she wrote again, suggesting a vastly reduced scheme and setting a maximum budget of $1 million. (Like most Kahn clients, she was learning from the process: having discovered by now that he would inevitably go over budget, she shrewdly gave him a ceiling that was less than what the nuns could actually afford.)
In March of 1967, after Kahn and Polk had produced many sketches, independently and together, in their effort to work out a smaller-scale design, they submitted a new plan that only took up about 50,000 square feet, and Polk soon followed that up with a cost estimate of $1,593,000, promising in an accompanying letter that the project could actually be built for $1.5 million. The nuns duly raised their ceiling back to the original level, and on August 7, 1967—sixteen months after their initial meeting—Louis Kahn and Mother Emmanuel signed a formal contract for architectural services. Kahn’s office then worked hard on the plans for a full year, cutting costs to the bone but also retaining the design principles that mattered most to him. The final compressed but cunningly arranged plan included separate areas for sleeping, eating, teaching, reading, worshipping, and encountering the outside world; it left room for an organic but nonetheless distinct relation between private prayer and the communal life; it physically embodied the convent’s hierarchical nature, at the same time as it separated “served” and “servant” spaces; and it relied, as always in Kahn’s mature work, on the complementary virtues of heavy masonry and natural light. In August of 1968 Lou was able to present the building committee with a design priced at $1,572,093. At a November meeting held in Media, he promised the sisters that he could have working drawings ready by June of the following year, at which point construction could commence, which meant they would be able to move into their new home before the end of 1970.
But though the question of money continued to worry the nuns, additional and possibly more important factors now entered the equation. The number of new Dominican sisters joining the convent had steadily declined in recent years and was likely to dwindle further. This trend came at the same time as the changes that were slowly permeating the entire Catholic Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council of 1965. Under the new principles, the whole notion of a monastic life had been reenvisioned and reformed, so that nuns as well as priests and monks were now expected to play a more active role in the worldly communities outside their cloisters. The spiritually contemplative life, the very thing which had drawn Lou to the project in the first place, was now largely a thing of the past, and the convent he had designed for the sisters was therefore no longer appropriate. In the end it was global history, and not just finances, that defeated Kahn’s Dominican Motherhouse. The project was terminated by mutual consent, and the two sides “parted friends,” according to the nuns.
In the case of the Memorial to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs, which was to be located in New York’s Battery Park, the probl
em was the divergence between client tastes and architect tastes. Hired in late 1966 by the memorial’s steering committee—which, unfortunately for Lou, actually consisted of two committees, the fifty-member Committee for the Six Million and the seventeen-member “arts advisory” committee chaired by art patron David Kreeger—Kahn had been charged with designing a monument that would commemorate the Holocaust dead. In November of 1967 he presented his first plan: a raised stone platform on which were planted three rows of three glass pillars each, all of them identical in size (twice as tall as a man) and shape (thick rectangular blocks). Resisting the pressure to create a literal rendering of the dead martyrs, Lou had opted instead for abstraction, and in a memo accompanying the plan he explained his choice of glass: “The Architect’s central thought was the Monument should present a non accusing character, and he thought of glass for its quality of material presence yet the sun could come through and leave a shadow yet filled with light. Not like marble or stone with its defined shadow; the stone could be accusing, the glass could not.”
